


the city is sinking

by Serindrana



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Horror, Lovecraftian, Psychological Horror, autocannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 11:06:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serindrana/pseuds/Serindrana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Dunwall is sinking, slow enough that nobody feels it, fast enough that in a week, they've lost half an inch; in a month, three.</i>
</p><p>Piero opens his Door to Nowhere. It has unexpected consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the city is sinking

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



The city is sinking.

It's an undeniable fact. He and Anton and a hundred students of the Academy have measured at a thousand points from the mouth of the Wrenhaven to the last outlying slum. They have charted and calculated and predicted, and there are no doubts left among any of them: Dunwall is sinking, slow enough that nobody feels it, fast enough that in a week, they've lost half an inch; in a month, three.

It's unclear whether the city has always been sinking, but Piero suspects that it would be an impossibility. Surely somebody would have noticed. _He_ would have noticed. But perhaps there is a cycle to these things, and the city rises and falls like a sleeping man's chest.

Or maybe it only sinks down, down, through rotting flesh and splitting bone, and soon the city will begin to sink not just into the earth but below it.

The Pendleton mines stretch deep into the soil, into the rock that serves as the world's shoulders and curved ribs, and so far they have never reached a bottom. Anton has a theory, though, that beneath even the solidest of stone there is water. That water is the natural state of existence. That it teems with life and with currents that eventually pull the islands apart and subsume them, then cough them back up in new configurations.

Piero argues with him in the unrelenting light of day, because that is what they do. But in his dreams, he sees endless underground caverns filled with murky seawater, and below that endless rivers flowing through oceans, coalescing into lakes that lead even deeper, deeper, deeper. At the bottom is a swirling pattern of black lines.

He wakes up. He descends the eighty-seven steps from his top-floor bedroom to his cellar, and he stares at the brick wall where once the same design was drawn. Now, it's only a groaning, whispering nothing. It is pitch-black. It is cold. It shudders and writhes and Piero stares at it until aboveground the sun has risen.

Nothing ever emerges from it, and he has not yet dared to step through it. His dreams rail against it. His dreams call it an abomination, a failure, a nothing. But it is the very _nothingness_ of it that has kept him from destroying it.

The city is sinking. His cellar sinks faster than the rest. The walls seem to stretch to try to keep up, but the floor is now a full foot deeper than it should be. The steps weep with seawater that should not be there.

He leaves the portal and climbs the stairs and bolts the door behind him, and sets about his work.

* * *

 

His notes cover sixty-five books now, and twenty-seven audiographs, and he keeps them all locked away when he isn't working on them. He is not usually such a private man. Back in the days of the conspiracy, he left his work scattered across two floors and four tables. His labs where he works on river krusts and charting shifts in stone are much the same. But down in the cellar he has carved a small chamber in the expanse of wall that shouldn't be (he has marked it now in chalk and in paint and in gouges) and he locks his books away there.

They are his greatest work.

He scribbles by lamplight, by ratlight, by any light he can get to work down here, but they all gutter out so quickly. His eyes grow accustomed to the dark, and he doesn't notice when he is left in pitch blackness, and does not know to care. He records the groans and the shudders and the way the floor has begun to tilt, the way that a drop of water runs up the incline and away from the portal. He draws sketches of how perspective has shifted down here. The chill inches into his bones.

When he falls asleep, he hears shouts. He sees his hands clawing at the brick, nails breaking and coming apart as he chips at the mortar. He wakes with aching, bloody hands.

* * *

 

He has ideas for a hundred thousand inventions, down there in the dark, but where once he would have moved to his lab, working feverishly through the night, now he barely remembers to climb the stairs and go for food. He notes, idly, that his metabolism has slowed further than it ever has before. He dashes off quick sketches to get the ideas to leave him alone, and then he measures again the stone that shouldn't be, and notes that there is now a thin vein of limestone.

Aboveground, the servants leave. His house is empty. Anton pounds at the door and leaves, disgusted, insulted, and Piero only sketches. He can see things in the nothing, now. They are nothing, too, but he can make out where the nothing shifts and changes and resettles. There are things beyond the brick wall that come from very far away and very deep below.

He notes, idly, that they feel familiar, like the shapes his dreams take.

He shivers and shakes and trembles. His head begins to throb in time with a rhythm he does not know. He presses forward. He notes every symptom in a wondering haze, and then he crawls into a corner and stares out at the room and tries to describe in words and pictures what he sees in the dark, because it is no longer a room. The stairs are gone, or too high to reach. There are six different kinds of stone in the walls that should have been only brick and plaster.

The city is sinking, but he is sinking faster.

When he wakes with blood in his mouth and a chunk of his tongue sitting heavy at the back of his throat, he dimly remembers to check the rest of himself for bruises, for injuries. His nails have been torn off six times now, clawing at the wall in his sleep. He has tried, once, going to sleep in his bed with the doors well-bolted, but it didn't help. Now it is too hard to leave.

He swallows the lump of flesh because to spit it out would be to waste it. He needs what little energy he has left now.

He is almost prepared to step through.

 

 


End file.
